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In the pattern we’ve established, about every six weeks I go over to Rick’s and we just sit and watch movies on his finely-calibrated plasma set (this time I got to drive through a monsoon, which is about as much fun as you’d expect). We’re both cinematic omnivores, but Rick’s a better omnivore than me, by which I mean he’s more open to new experiences, which I sometimes approach with a sense of dread.

This time, we had lucked upon a theme for our choices: Cinematic icons at war with each other (that two of the movies were on my 100 list for this year was certainly a bonus). To set the groundwork for this, we began with Werner Herzog’s sublime documentary on his fractious relationship with Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend.

Kinski’s on-set tantrums were the stuff of legend, and Herzog was frequently the focus of those screaming fits; somehow they still managed to make five movies together that stand as classics of modern cinema. Herzog reveals that he met Kinski while the director was still a child; they both lived for a time in a boarding house, and found Kinski absolutely terrifying (but admittedly memorable). He then leads us through their movies and times together, revisiting locations and interviewing people years after the fact. Eva Mattes, his co-star in Woyzeck, and Claudia Cardinale, ditto for Fitzcarraldo, seem to be the only people who have nice things to say about Kinski. Apparently this is the sort of thing that happens when one fires a rifle into a hut full of extras.

Herzog, I think, has the proper range to gauge the truth about Kinski – a self-aggrandizing egomaniac who used his rages to make sure he was the center of attention at all times. Even then, Herzog continues, once his rage was spent, Kinski was capable of genius, and his hair-trigger temper kept everyone very professional, lest they trigger another outburst. Other footage, at festivals and behind the scenes, confirm Mattes and Cardinale’s tales that he was capable of great charm and warmth. My Best Fiend is an amazing odyssey, and if nothing else, it makes you want to watch these movies all over again.

Uh, about that “Tobe Hooper”…

The thing is, this was actually homework. Rick had been doing one of those falling-down-the-wikipedia rabbit hole affairs, checking for details on his new favorite actor, Oliver Reed, when he discovered that Reed had made a movie with Kinski in 1981 – Venom – and the idea of trying to keep those two in control during production led to us seeking it out. At the very least, I thought, Reed would eventually drink himself into unconsciousness…

Venom is one of those movies where you suspect the making would have made a better movie than what wound up onscreen. Based on a fairly successful suspense novel by South African writer Alan Scholefield, it was originally going to be directed by Tobe Hooper, who left over “creative differences” (by some reports, a nervous breakdown). Kinski apparently later crowed at a premiere party that he and the other actors ganged up on the Texan to make him quit. Director Piers Haggard replaced him (best known in these parts for Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Quatermass Conclusion), who later opined that the nicest person on the set was the black mamba snake.

The story concerns the kidnapping of a motel magnate’s son which goes rapidly south when one of the conspirators, the family’s chauffeur (Reed), panics and shoots a police officer, killing him. The officer was there to alert the family that the son – who has quite the menagerie in his room – accidentally picked up the black mamba from the pet store instead of a harmless African house snake. Now the snake is loose in the house, which is surrounded by the Police, and it’s in a nastier mood than the kidnappers.

Kinski plays Jaclen, the mastermind behind the crime. Susan George is his girlfriend, who’s worked in the household for eight weeks as a maid. Sterling Hayden, in his penultimate role, looks incredibly out-of-place as the boy’s grandfather, a retired big game hunter. Sarah Miles is a herpetologist whose major jobs are to A) tell us how deadly black mambas are, and how they can do everything except teleport through walls (and the jury is out on that one) and B) get taken hostage by Jaclen. All good actors (each with their own varying reputations for being difficult) that put in acceptable jobs, but the one I enjoyed was Nicol Williamson as the Police Inspector who gets saddled with this mess.

But Rick and I were there to watch the fireworks between Kinski and Reed. There aren’t many visible, which is remarkable considering that Reed basically spent the entire shoot annoying Kinski to make him blow. What shows up in the movie belies that, with Reed playing an increasingly desperate everyman who is in way, way over his head, and Kinski playing the calmest man in the house. There is one scene, when Reed makes one of his many trips to the liquor cabinet, and Kinski grabs his hand, stopping him – there is a true flash of hatred, and it looks like the split second before a massive bar brawl starts.

“You are about to lose that f*cking Nazi hand.”

“Acceptable” is a fair adjective to use on Venom. You won’t begrudge its 90 minutes, but you probably won’t care to revisit it, either. The best illustration for its problems is the scene where Kinski forces Hayden to search a room for the snake (since he has experience with the nasty things), and as constructed, it should be very suspenseful – or it would be if it hadn’t been established in the previous scene that the snake has already slithered into the ventilating system. We know it’s not in that room. Still, Haggard should be commended for producing a movie that’s at least watchable, given that he had absolutely no prep time, a script that was already locked down, and a cast that wanted to murder each other on the good days.

All this was mere preparation, though, for the main event. A movie which Rick and I had managed to get through our entire lives without seeing, setting two screens icons against each other: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

If, like Rick, you’re familiar with the title but have no idea what the movie’s about: Baby Jane is a vaudeville singing sensation whose ignored sister Blanche becomes a beloved movie star in the 30s while Jane’s movies are… struggling. One night, there is an auto accident involving the two, resulting in Blanche confined to a wheelchair. Fast forward to the 60s, where Jane and Blanche have aged into Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Jane is taking care of Blanche, but is becoming increasingly unstable and abusive. Emphasis on the abusive, as during the course of the picture, Jane will cut Blanche off from the outside world and proceed to torment her.

Movies like this – psychological horror/hostage dramas -have never been my cup of tea, which is why I’ve avoided the movie all this time, but now I’ve seen it. And I can say I’ve seen it. It is a well-made movie, and it broke box office records at the time. Director Robert Aldrich (who has quite the varied and interesting filmography) uses the open enmity between Davis and Crawford for all its worth, but this isn’t just a carnival gladiator match, like Reed and Kinski; there is some real depth and acting here using all that hate.

Crawford does a marvelous job – audience sympathy obviously goes out to her, but she never quite makes Blanche likable, a choice that pays off on repeat viewings – but there is never any doubt that Davis owns this picture. She takes possession of the character of Jane and positively nails every single frame she is in to a wall. Davis had a great degree of leeway from Aldrich in designing Jane’s appearance, reasoning, among other things, that Jane never washed her face, just applied more makeup. Roger Ebert once wrote that the canniest career move Bette Davis ever made was growing older. He was talking about All About Eve, but the same reasoning holds here, The incredible grotesquerie that Davis breathes life and malevolence into is not to be missed (even if this type of movie is not your cup of tea). This is what total commitment looks like. Davis was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar that year, but it went to Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker.

If more motivation to watch is needed, you can also toss in Victor Buono’s debut role as an unemployed musician desperate for the gig playing for Baby Jane’s fantasy comeback; their first scene together is like a miniature acting school, sidewise glances that tell us everything we need to know about what is going on in the characters’ minds.

This rather marks a high point for both actresses at this stage in their careers; the shelf life for Hollywood actresses is depressingly, frustratingly short, and for them the future held more of the same, but lesser. Davis in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (which I prefer quite a bit over Jane) and The Nanny, Crawford in Straitjacket and Trog. This was a high point, as sad as that might seem.

I have watched a lot of horror movies in my life, and I really have no idea how many times I’ve seen the story of Dracula play out. In the course of my time on this Earth, I have seen the Count go from Evil Incarnate to Tragic Romantic Hero (a metamorphosis of which I do not approve). I suppose the ultimate capper was when I finally got to play my dream role, Van Helsing, in a theatrical version that was pretty close to the novel, meaning I actually lived the story for a few months. Good as the story is – and there are portions of Bram Stoker’s novel that deserve their high place in the annals of horror fiction – man I am tired of this story.

So, I have managed successfully to avoid Dario Argento’s Dracula, although I admit I have never seen the Count turn into a giant praying mantis, but I’m afraid that even that novelty isn’t enough to make me sit through that series of events again. But I am more than willing to make an exception for Werner Herzog’s remake of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

The first reason is the storyline of Nosferatu is different enough to seem fresh (not fresh enough for Stoker’s widow Florence, who very nearly succeeded in making Murnau’s version a lost film). Removed from the possibility of litigious widows, Herzog returns the character’s original names, though for some reason possibly only known to himself, he flips the characters of Lucy and Mina. He also combines the characters of Van Helsing and Dr. Seward, but combining characters is par for the course in versions of Dracula.

The other reason, of course is this is Werner freakin’ Herzog. This is the director who made a movie about dragging a steamship over a mountain by dragging a steamship over a mountain. No sets for this man, if Castle Dracula must be a ruined castle atop an inaccessible mountain, he hauls his cast and crew to a ruined castle atop an inaccessible mountain. When the ghost ship Demeter drifts to port, bringing the vampire and his numerous coffins, that is a real damn ship scraping the walls of the canals of Drelft in the Netherlands. Herzog makes no bones about his intentions as the opening credits play out over footage of actual mummified corpses in Guanajuato, Mexico.

As Herzog’s version of the story progresses, it gets farther and farther from Murnau’s, as Herzog is not going to be satisfied with Gus Van Sant-ing what he considers to be one of the most important movies in German cinema. The most telling embellishment brings to the fore the metaphor of vampire as disease; a lot of treatises and think pieces have been written about vampires representing syphilis or AIDS, and Herzog runs with it. The arrival of the ghost ship also brings an army of rats, and the Plague with a capital P descends on the town. Again, Herzog doesn’t rely on camera angles and trickery to turn a couple of hundred rats into an army, we are talking thousands of the suckers, white rats bought from a scientific research supply and dyed gray for their moment in the limelight.

The cast is an amazing lot, too: Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Harker, the lovely Isabelle Adjani – looking as if she has just stepped off the silent screen – as Lucy, and, of course, Klaus Kinski as Dracula. Kinski and Herzog’s fractious, often violent relationship yielded some of the most amazing cinema of the 20th century, and Kinski’s Count is so layered, he is almost impenetrable. He would never be mistaken for a romantic hero, but he is unmistakably tragic, sometimes conflicted, but above all, very, very frightening and otherworldly.

Possibly the most satisfying parts of this movie are the times Herzog, ever the intelligent filmmaker, has the reverence to simply restage shots from the original, and they remain just as powerful in this present day as they did nearly a century ago, reminding us why both films are considered masterpieces.

I know I’m not the only person who thought August sucked. Reports have poured in from all over the globe that yes, the August of 2013 was particularly brutal in all sorts of ways. Yours truly was seeking to get his mojo back, and not having a whole bunch of success. Let’s see how that shakes out:

The small matter of diabetes. Generally this was pretty favorable, as I settle into my new official lifestyle. The last week I was working on a solid seven days of healthy sugar levels when bam! my levels Saturday night shot up to 207. The cause? Apparently the stress of performing in my weekly show – that was the only change in my daily routine. For someone who has been acting most of his adult life, this is a daunting development. Frustrated, I had a cheeseburger after the show. The next morning, my fasting sugars were normal.

Wacky. I prefer to take this as a lesson in the magic of cheeseburgers, nature’s perfect food.

One thing I did manage when I wasn’t ruminating on the heat attempting to kill me and everything around me, was to develop a plan for re-organizing my home office. Yes, because I don’t have enough things to occupy my Copious Free Time. This is actually connected to one of the other problems of August, the Not-Watching of Movies.

Oh, I still did, as these infrequent ramblings prove. Just not to the excess or with the zeal of previous months. That most notorious of self-imposed regimens, The List, may not be completed this year. Things change. I change.

“I hate you, Tom Cruise! HATE YOU!!!”

I’ve done two movie-watching challenges this year, and those have done a number on me. I don’t necessarily regret either, but the cost extracted is problematic. I enjoy watching movies, and injecting a definite discipline into that watching kills some of the joy. Probably one of the reasons I never pursued a career as an actual film critic: I want that joy to stay. I’ve seen too many give in to a gradual souring until all they can do is point out negatives; I respect people who continue their love affair with the movies on a regular basis, and keep their writing fresh and accessible.

So. Just because I haven’t been watching movies on a regular basis doesn’t mean I stopped acquiring them, either. I now have quite a few movies I am genuinely excited about watching.

Which is why I want to re-organize my office.

My office pretty much arranged itself organically. When we moved into this house twelve years ago, most of the bookshelves found their way into my office, and they got filled. Then filled again. Then the overstock started hitting the floor. Then I added a reading chair. My computer desk has not moved from its corner, where I can look out the window and, if necessary, see who may be approaching the house – the paranoia of my youth has not completely vanished. There is an increasingly narrow path from the door to my desk.

So current plans involve clearing out the piles of electronics and cabling and power sources that have landed in this room over the years. Clearing out the table that holds a TV/DVD player that hasn’t worked in ten years. My laserdisc player, which surprisingly, still does. Cataloging and boxing up stacks of books and either clearing a space in an equally chaotic garage to store them, or actually investing in a storage room (not ideal). Unpacking the boxes of DVDs that sit in the center of the room, determining which of them I am never going to watch and getting rid of them, and putting the rest in theoretically cleared bookshelves.

Then: Reorienting the former TV table and the reading chair to face each other. Buying a TV manufactured in this century and (ideally) a region-free Blu-Ray player. Maybe a sound bar, probably not. I still have the Roku that was on the downstairs TV, but I mothballed when we got a Smart TV.

When I bought that TV and its companion Blu-ray, I thought I was being exceptionally sly by making sure the first thing seen on it was Dancing With The Stars, thereby convincing my skeptical wife that it was, indeed, a necessary purchase. In the style of classical tragedy, however, this rebounded on me by ensuring all subsequent broadcasts of Dancing With The Stars had to be watched in HD, and I swear to you that fucking show is on four nights a week.

“And we have PEGGED Freeman’s Hate Meter!”

So. I of course rarely buy DVDs anymore, because drool drool Blu-ray slobber giggle. And ergo, I need my own little island of Blu-ray viewing so I can watch these fabulous movies I’ve been stockpiling, at will.

The real problem with this dream is the amount of work it’s going to take, in a schedule that includes my part-time job, the other part-time job, the other other part-time job, and the two ongoing writing projects, not to mention any housework, cooking, or parental duties. I estimate two months before I’m even ready to price TVs (I’m lying, I’m already doing that) and start reaping the benefits of this madness.

But like i said, in the meantime, I managed to watch some movies.

Sometimes your interests in obscure movie subgenres lead you down a darkened alley with whispered promises and then punches you, takes your lunch money and runs away. Actually, that’s a pretty fair description of what happens most of the time. That is certainly the case with Vixens of Kung Fu. It’s a somewhat legendary grindhouse feature, primarily legendary because for years, it was damn near impossible to see. It’s a hardcore sex film with kung fu elements, although the martial arts elements here make David Carradine look like Jet Li possessed by the spirit of Bruce Lee.

Bree Anthony is walking through some autumn woods and gets accosted by three porn actors (One of whom is supposedly Jamie Gillis, though I didn’t recognize him). She runs away, but get shot in the back. The three lowlifes then proceed to rape her semi-conscious form while the music changes to bluegrass. About a half-hour later, under the tender lesbian ministrations of a female kung fu master (C.J. Laing), we are told that she was shot with “the gun of anesthesia”, which explained the lack of bullet holes and other trauma, I suppose.

So there are some ladies who are Laing’s students, who practice some questionable martial arts and meditation that causes smoke to issue from their lady parts. A lanky yellow-clad caucasian monk ventures into their territory, gets waylaid, is declared an unsatisfactory lover and tossed out. He begs another female master – currently disguised as a cook in a Chinese restaurant – to teach him “Golden Dragon Raising Head Kung Fu”. Which involves training and masturbating in the woods. There is another showdown, with the Monk and Anthony acrobatically schtupping each other into unconsciousness. Yeah, forget the rapists, I guess they were too expensive to bring back for a vengeance scene.

The Vinegar Syndrome DVD is unbelievably gorgeous – the autumn foliage really pops. Porn, however, is always boring, and there wasn’t anything Vinegar Syndrome could do about that. Vixens has its wild moments that raise it slightly above the norm, but there’s not enough of it to make it interesting enough for a recommendation.

Hey, remember Jack Reacher? Remember how a lot of people were pissed off that Tom Cruise was playing the main character? Man, that seems like it was so long ago. Long enough that the Blu-ray is cheap, so I bought it, primarily because I was intrigued by the idea of Werner Herzog playing the bad guy.

I haven’t read any of the books – and was, in fact, unaware of the character at all – so I didn’t have a dog in the Tom Cruise hunt. What I did find was a pretty serviceable, if fairly unoriginal, crime investigation movie that morphs into an action flick as our heroes get closer to the truth.

The plot concerns a sniping incident involving the death of five people, apparently the work of a crazed loner trained in Iraq. His only statement under interrogation is “Get Jack Reacher”. Reacher is a former Military policeman who caught the culprit in a similar incident in country – but there are several inconsistencies with the current shooting that stick in his craw. Behind the machinations, of course, is Herzog as a man known only as “The Zeck” – who once gnawed the frostbitten fingers off his own hand in Siberia to prevent gangrene.

Herzog is muted and incredibly creepy as the criminal mastermind. I thought Cruise was fine as Reacher, though, as I said, I have no prior knowledge of the character to color my judgement. The supporting cast is terrific, there are a couple of good fight scenes. Overall, though, you can wait to see this on Netflix.

Over the past year or so, I’ve watched two movies about Idi Amin. One, Amin: The Rise and Fall, was a somewhat sensationalized docudrama. The second, The Last King of Scotland, was pure fiction with enough basis in fact to make it solid. So somehow I find myself watching Barbet Schroeder’s General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, which is undeniably the real thing.

Amin granted Schroeder a number of interviews and staged several adoring rallies for the camera. He also gathered together 150 French citizens living in Uganda and threatened to kill them if Schroeder didn’t cut three minutes from the movie. Schroeder, of course, did so, and at this point the “Self Portrait” portion of the title came into being, as Schroeder felt it was now totally under Amin’s control. After the dictator’s deposing, the cuts were restored, and that is the version Criterion rightfully issued.

The cut portions mainly concerned public executions, and a few snippets from a dispassionate narrator mentioning the staged appearances, or pointing out people who would later be found mysteriously dead or vanish altogether. These quite undercut the persona Amin presents otherwise, an affable man of the people, always ready with a joke or a laugh – downright charming, most times. It’s surprising Amin didn’t want one entire section cut, when he is conferencing with a very critical group of senior physicians, and Schroeder zooms in his face – unhappy, brooding, eyes darting back and forth as if seeking escape – as in that moment he actually looks capable of ordering the death of almost 300,000 of his countrymen. Then he turns on the charm and gets the doctors laughing.

Schroeder ends the movie with that same close-up, and with a bit of narration that Amin did insist be cut; that cut remains, and the moment plays out in powerful silence.

Labor Day I journeyed into town with pal Dave to see an animated movie that he – and a couple of my other friends – did voice talent for a couple of years ago: Last Flight of the Champion. This was apparently the culmination of two brothers’ lifelong dream, and by golly they even managed to get a (very) limited theatrical release. There were about seven of us in attendance, and we owned that theater.

The plot isn’t new; galactic despot is taking over planets (I guess because he can), and a painfully earnest young turtle guy finds a buried spaceship left over from the last round of galactic despot fighting, the Champion. Yes, turtle – this is a sci-fi universe populated by animal toons alongside humans. The turtle puts together a crew of similarly painfully earnest misfits and flies off to take on Darth Meanie and his armada.

I went into this movie with great misgivings, mainly thinking that there were movies I really wanted to see but couldn’t carve out the time, like The Conjuring or You’re Next, but here I was walking into a theater to see something that had been described as having computer animation on the level of a local TV commercial.

Well, it wasn’t that bad. Pixar has nothing to worry about, but there were some very nice sequences. The characters aren’t very detailed (and there are way too many of them), and for some reason the animators, when the script says “Let’s hurry!” still has everyone cycle through the same walk animation they’ve been using the whole time. The script is pretty good, though there are some clunky parts, and the story shows some drastic cutting – but my friends did good work, there’s some cleverness in the background details, and overall, it didn’t suck. In fact, it was downright painless.

So that’s The Last Flight of the Champion. You got kids who like science fiction, it’s a safe bet.

“Rated PG for some rude humor.” Huh. That means a monkey flings poo. Offscreen. People only talk about it. I don’t get the MPAA.

You know what? It actually does chafe my lazy ass when I don’t weigh in here for a while. Really, it does. Though that amounts to the posterior of a rat when I don’t have the time to do a halfway decent job of it; I suppose if I didn’t care about things like spelling and general grammar it would be a lot easier. Speaking of spelling and grammar:

Most of my free time is taken up by being paid to slam words together. I’m currently working on three separate projects, of which only one is a sure thing, but that sure thing is paying me actual money. Money is good, I like money. I’m fairly certain that not stressing over getting the bills paid has put an extra month or two on the back end of my lifespan.

SAY HELLO TO MY LEETLE FRIENDS!

Money also helps in the other current fun struggle of my life, my recent diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes. That is not going as swimmingly as I would like, but pfft! What does? It doesn’t take a pack of scientists to point out to you that Eating Right is expensive, which makes no goddamn sense to me, but that only means that it fits in well with the rest of the world at large. I started with unregulated sugars near the three hundred mark, and now generally clock in under 200. I need to exercise more, but A) gyms are also expensive, and B) we are currently experiencing one King Hell heat wave, which renders the outdoor exercise idea kinda risky. Twenty years ago, I would get up at 4am to get in five miles before the sun came up and tried to obliterate the city. I was also twenty years younger then.

Besides trying to coax creativity out of a brain trapped in a system with changing blood chemistry, I find that the other thing cutting into my movie-watching time is the twice-daily blood test. Most of my movie-watching got done in the evening, after dinner. I now have to wait 30 minutes after din-din to do the evening stick, and I haven’t gotten good enough at it to perform the ritual in my easy chair. I need a desk or table to hold everything at the ready, glucometer, lancet, alcohol pad. Doing otherwise really tempts the Blood Gods and I wind up wasting a test strip, which even bought at a discount cost 25 cents a pop. What I’ve gotten really good at is cursing, though many would opine I already had a fair mastery of that art.

As I’m writing prose, I’m also reading more. I’m pleased to announce that so far, Richard Kadrey’s Kill City Blues may be his best yet. But I feel that I’m stealing time away even for that.

Enough. I watched some stuff.

Ever since Fitzcarraldo, I had wanted to see Les Blank’s documentary on its making, Burden of Dreams, which, unlike a lot of Blank’s work, is fortunately available on a Criterion disc. Given Herzog’s penchant for absolute, even dangerous realism – that is damn well a real boat being hauled up that incline – it is no surprise that the actual filming was a massive clusterfuck on the level of Apocalypse Now.

But the surprising thing is – and Herzog acknowledges this in the supplementary material – is that Blank produces a documentary that is not so much a retelling of the filmmaking process, but of the life around the process, how it affects and possibly even changes people. The film junkie in me is kind of disappointed, but Herzog admires and respects the result, so I probably should, too.

My son & I went to see Pacific Rim, and we had a whole lot of fun. I am bemused that a whole generation of kids are going to know the word kaiju and have no idea who Godzilla is, or worse, think he’s a giant iguana. Maybe next year’s movie will change that.

Yes, I know a lot of people diss Pacific Rim. I don’t care. Haven’t you figured that out yet?

And speaking of not caring: it was about that time that Sharknado hit. It certainly lit up Twitter, though that didn’t seem to convert into ratings numbers; nevertheless, it was rebroadcast the next week, got a theatrical booking, and the sequel is on the way.

I don’t have cable (too expensive for something I wouldn’t use). This did not stop people from chiding me over my lack of opinion and bloviating about Sharknado. They were disappointed in me. Where was my bad movie moxie? When was I going to watch it? Huh? Huh?

Well, since I am apparently some sort of dancing monkey, I found a way to see it. The movie achieves Maximum Stupid in the first three minutes and spends the rest of the movie trying to match it. It comes close many times. This really is the sort of thing I would have gone on and on about for 2000 words back in the day, but you know what? There are lots of people already doing that for Sharknado. I see despairing posts from other critics about how they’re tired of spectacle, how Man of Steel‘s fight scenes put them to sleep, waaaaah. That’s how I am with stupidity. Especially willful stupidity. Make no mistake, that’s what this is; once they had that title, they ran with it. I appreciate that. However…

I had Wild Strawberries and The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp waiting on me upstairs, but there I was, succumbing to peer pressure and watching Sharknado. This dancing monkey didn’t even get some coins in his tin cup.

So after spending most of its running time wondering where the title character was and saying things like, “Wow, you can firebomb a tornado out of existence from a helicopter?”, I shot the world the finger and watched Onibaba.

Onibaba had been on my radar for a long, time, since my teen years when it cropped up in a book about horror movies. So it finally got scooped up in one of those Barnes & Noble Criterion sales.

Based on a Buddhist fable, it’s the tale of two Japanese women in the (I think) period of constant civil war preceding the Tokugawa era. They are a mother and her daughter-in-law; the son went off to war and while they wait for him to come back and work the farm, they make ends meet by waylaying defeated samurai seeking to hide in the sea of reeds surrounding their hut. The samurai’s bodies are tossed down a deep hole and their armor and weapons traded to the local black marketeer for grain.

The son’s friend returns with news of the son’s death, and so begins the unraveling of the relationship between the two women. The friend makes a play for the recently widowed daughter-in-law, and she returns his interest. Mom is worried that she’ll be left to fend for herself, and is also dealing with not a small amount of sexual frustration herself.

While the two young’uns are out dallying, Mom has to take out a samurai wearing a demon mask all by herself, and gets an idea. Once she takes the mask off his corpse – revealing a hideously disfigured face – she uses the mask to scare the daughter away from her nighttime visits to her stud. Since I found this in a book of horror movies, we can be pretty sure that this is going to backfire in some terrible manner.

Onibaba is definite slow-burn material; director Kaneto Shindo (who passed away only last year, and was also responsible for Kuroneko, another Criterion offering) serves up great vistas of tall reeds swaying in the wind like a vertical ocean, its turbulence obscuring and drowning his characters. It’s astounding how erotically charged the relationships become, how the daughter blossoms under the interloper’s attentions. This is another movie that, although made in 1964, when even Roger Corman was making color movies, could not have been produced in any medium but black and white. The characters, though far from smart, are drawn with such craft that their survivalist cunning was more than a tonic for Sharknado.

As a tribute to the late Roger Ebert, some members of the Letterboxd community are spending May visiting films in his Great Movies series. Since this dovetails with my personal project of filling shameful voids in my film education, I decided to commit myself, once more, to a regimented schedule for which I don’t really have time, but hey, you know. Movies.

Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

One of the things I went into this challenge swearing was that I was going to source every movie from my collection, local library system, or Netflix, and then I proceeded to immediately violate that vow. I had long meant to break my fast of non-documentary Werner Herzog, and there had been a box set of all the movies he had made with Klaus Kinski, put out by Anchor Bay in the 00’s. This monumental temptation combined with it being at its lowest price ever on Amazon – somewhere in the $25 range – tipped over into scheduling two of his most famous works for the month.

Aguirre takes place during Gonzalo Pizarro’s disastrous expedition to the Amazon River to find the fabled golden city of El Dorado. He did this by trekking his army – of soldiers and lots of Indian slaves – over the Andes mountains, and that is where the movie begins, with seemingly hundreds of people in period costumes (including two women) carefully picking their way down a mountain path, burdened by baggage and equipment. There is no trickery involved, no matte paintings or CGI, that is a bunch of people literally climbing down a mountain. This seems to be a prime indicator of how Herzog works.

Once at the immense river, Pizarro decides to send a party on rafts to see if they can find any indication of El Dorado within a week. He places Don Ursua (Ruy Guerra) in charge, with Aguirre (Kinski) his second. Against Pizarro’s better judgement, Ursua’s wife Inez (Helena Rojo) and Aguirre’s daughter Flores (Cecelia Rivera) are allowed to accompany them.

The raft-borne party is almost immediately in trouble, encountering rapids that leave one raft trapped in an eddy against a cliff wall, and this is where the true power of Herzog’s approach is revealed: those are his actual actors on the rafts, in the rapids, and his actual cameras. Though you can never claim the movie employs a documentary approach, there is a visceral, fearsome quality to the footage that cannot be matched.

Things get worse: the trapped raft is slaughtered in the night by unseen Indians. The Amazon rises fifteen feet, carrying away the original rafts and drowning much of the shoreline, denying the new rafts any but the rarest opportunity to make landfall. Rather than turn back as ordered, Aguirre leads a mutiny, intending to claim the city of gold not for Spain, but himself. Cannibals are encountered. An increasingly creaky and ill-kept cannon is employed. Starvation, fever, and sudden death by arrow, dart and spear become the norm, until the totally insane Aguirre finds himself master of a raft populated by corpses and monkeys.

Starvation and fever are probably apt terms for the grueling movie shoot. This is the movie that gave rise to the legend of Herzog pulling a gun on Kinski to keep him from walking off the set (if you can truly refer to these shooting locations as “sets”). Kinksi himself provides some pretty top-notch madness in his portrayal, his body seemingly becoming as contorted as his mind as the picture progresses. Though I never really got over the novelty of hearing Spanish conquistadors speaking German, the rest of the cast scurries to keep up with Kinski, and the ensemble is remarkable, not only in their acting but their stamina.

Mere summaries of the plot of Aguirre cannot match the visceral punch of the movie itself. This truly is a movie that must be seen, on its own terms, to truly appreciate. The money for that box set was damned well spent.

The trailer’s dubbed, but it is a very good dub:

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

It was almost impossible to not follow up Aguirre with Fitzcarraldo, as Herzog and Kinski return to Peru for another grueling historical adventure. This time we’re in the early 20th century and Kinski Is Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (called Fitzcarraldo because the natives can’t pronounce “Fitzgerald”), a man who’s bankrupted himself attempting to build a Trans-Andean railroad. His main dream, though, is to build an opera house in this Peruvean rubber boom town, and since he can convince none of the rubber barons to put their money into this, he must become a rubber baron himself.

After a meeting with the most sympathetic of the barons, Fitzcarraldo has a daring plan: there is a section of the rain forest that is so far unexploited because of treacherous rapids. He aims to get to this unspoiled region by actually porting his 300-ton second-hand steamship over the narrowest isthmus between two rivers, a plan so daring that even the mechanic, a spy for the rubber baron, is impressed and joins in whole-heartedly. Clearing the jungle from the proposed path and actually moving the ship overland is only possible because the feared Jivaro natives, impressed by the boat, Fitzcarraldo’s immaculate white suits, and his phonograph records of Caruso, feel the boat is a holy vessel on a mission to purge evil spirits.

Fitzcarraldo is almost three hours long, but it’s one of those movies where it doesn’t feel like three hours, but at the end, you are exhausted and feel like you’ve been on that trip down the river yourself. True to form, Herzog doesn’t cheat with miniatures on that impossible portage – that is a real damn ship being dragged up an impossible slope, something engineers warned against. There is a part of Les Blank’s documentary on the making of the movie, Burden of Dreams, that shows a scene where one of the cables snaps during filming, and it’s quite likely that Kinski himself as well as other actors could have been decapitated or otherwise maimed. This is lunatic filmmaking at its finest, and the scenes of the ship slowly moving uphill invoke an incredible amount of tension in the viewer that would be impossible with models or CGI.

The movie also has lush scenery to spare and several shots that must have been ravishing on a big screen. Jason Robards at one point had the title role, but fell ill and was forbidden by his doctor to return to the production. Apparently Jack Nicholson at one point was the replacement, but felt the production was too insane, even for him. So it fell to Kinski, Herzog’s “best fiend”, and it has to be admitted that he brings to the role an injured vulnerability that plays well against the character’s seemingly unrealistic optimism. The experience would have been markedly different with the either of the earlier two actors.

And now I have got got got to see Burden of Dreams. I only know of that one scene through Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

This was one of the conditions of the Challenge: watch 30 movies from Ebert’s Great Movies, and also this movie, which, while it was not on the list, was actually written by Roger Ebert.

The movie version of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls made money, so a sequel was inevitable; Susann herself wrote one, but Fox didn’t like it. The conditions of the contract gave them the right to make the sequel, with or without Susann, so somehow it fell into the lap of Russ Meyer, leading to the disclaimer at the very beginning that this is not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls.

As Ebert points out on his commentary track on the DVD, Meyer wasn’t all that interested in making sex movies; his primary interests were melodrama and comedy, something that is apparent to anyone who ever watched more than one of his movies. And Beyond the Valley of the Dolls offers melodrama in great dollops. Meyer and Ebert found Valley to be the tale of young innocents in the showbiz trade having their lives wrecked by sex and drugs, but it was sadly lacking in rock and roll. Ergo, Beyond is the tale of a female rock trio who move to LA, hit it big and immediately life gets complicated and melodramatic.

The screenplay is nothing special, outside of a few quotes that have become memorable camp classics. What Beyond does best is remind us of just how good a filmmaker Russ Meyer actually was – those montages over the rock songs of the Carrie Nations are superbly done, and actually progress the story. There is a backstage scene after one of their gigs that could have been crowded and sloppy, but instead clearly establishes every major character arc and relationship – it is really a small master class in managing such scenes.

Quite a bit is made of the blood-soaked ending, inspired by the Manson Family killings while Meyer and Ebert were still formulating the movie. You can see how actually conservative are the underpinnings of the story when the dead include the lesbian and the one character to have an abortion; but in case you missed it, the voice of Marvin Miller will appear at the end to recap what lessons you should have learned.

The acting is often as ripe as the dialogue, but that just serves to cement that everything here is of a piece. The Carrie Nations consists of two Playmates and a model, and they do just fine. John Lazar as quick-tongued promoter Z-Man is given all the best lines and delivers them with a quicksilver panache that makes you wonder why the hell you haven’t seen more of him in the intervening years. David Gurian, as the band’s unsophisticated manager, deserves some kind of acting award for making it look like having sex with (future Mrs. Russ Meyer) Edy Williams was a chore.

There is absolutely no use pretending Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is anything but trash. But as entertaining, well-made trash, it has very few real competitors.

El Topo (1970)

It was either sheer perversity or sheer traditionalism that made me hit “Play” on El Topo at midnight. This is the movie that single-handedly started the Midnight Movie phenomenon, a phenomenon that even hit my teenage Texas town, which had a large college population. My midnight movies usually ran to Amicus double features or an amazing night with all four Beatles movies in a row, but their ancestry can be traced to El Topo, John and Yoko, and Beatles manager Allen Klein, who is the Abkco Films you see at the very beginning.

El Topo begins as an existential Western, with the title gunslinger (director Alejandro Jodorowsky himself) traveling the desert with his naked 7 year-old son, dispensing harsh justice to a murderous villain called The Colonel and his bandits. He leaves his son with a group of rescued monks and heads into the desert to face the Four Masters that reside there. He defeats them by trickery, which exacts a large cost on his psyche when he realizes exactly what he has become, and what he has destroyed. At this point we are not even halfway through the movie; the rest tells of his redemption by helping a group of crippled outcasts escape from their underground prison.

Like The Holy Mountain – a Jodorowsky movie I much prefer – a spare synopsis is not going to even begin to replicate the experience of actually seeing the movie. Jodorowsky’s imagery is not as outlandish here, but it is still lush and plentiful. A small town massacred by the Colonel, where there is so much blood in the streets it looks like rain puddles. The grave of the first Master becomes a beehive. The third master lives in a corral of rabbits, who start keeling over dead as El Topo approaches. A church where the worship service is composed of the congregation playing Russian Roulette. It goes on and on to a dizzying, violent end that makes a little more sense than The Holy Mountain, but only a little.

2013 is a pretty good year for Jodorowsky. His first movie in 23 years, The Dance of Reality is poised for release, a documentary about his aborted attempt to make the movie version of Dune has done well at Cannes. But all this serves to point up that the man has only made 9 movies in his life, and not for lack of trying. I have only seen three of those movies, and those were enough to convince me that this paucity of Jodorowsky movies is a damn crime against humanity.